The body of 60-year-old Bhuban Chandra Roy was found hanging in Jalpaiguri’s Rajganj on Friday morning.
The ruling Trinamool Congress claimed that his death was yet another example of people taking their own lives over fear linked to the ongoing special intensive revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls in the state.
His family told police he had been breaking under stress after discovering that his daughter’s name was not on the voter list. He went missing on Thursday night.
Police have begun a probe. A senior officer said, “Investigations are on.”
In an X post, TMC accused the SIR of triggering avoidable tragedies: "Sixty-year-old Bhuban Chandra Roy was found hanging from a tree in the morning, driven to despair because his daughter never received an enumeration form. This is not a sequence of random misfortunes. This is the predictable human cost of a process that was rushed, politicised and rolled out without basic safeguards."
Rajganj MLA Khageswar Roy reached the family’s home soon after the news broke, saying similar cases have emerged in other districts.
The TMC claims at least 11 deaths, seven of them suicides, since the last week of October. All, it insists, are linked to anxiety over the verification drive.
The party’s attack on the Election Commission grew: "Who benefits from this engineered panic? Not the people of Bengal. Not the families left to bury their dead. The only beneficiaries are those who seek to manufacture consent by frightening citizens into silence. @ECISVEEP’s clumsy SIR rollout, aided and abetted by a party whose political desperation is now plain for all to see, has turned the entire process into an instrument of persecution."